ACLU PRESS CONFERENCE



ACLU PRESS CONFERENCE

AUGUST 25, 2003

MS. MURPHY: Good morning, my name is Laura Murphy. And I'm Director of the ACLU Washington office. Politically and socially, our lives have changed markedly since the tragedy of September 11th, 2001. Safety has become a paramount concern, especially in the area of air travel. While we all want to live in a safer society, we also want to live free from unnecessary Government measures that erode the Constitutional values of this great nation. Whether it is provisions of the PATRIOT Act, or declaring U.S. citizens enemy combatants, or listening in on attorney-client conversations, spying on library and medical records, many of us have questioned whether the Government is taking advantage of our fears to amass new and unnecessary powers.

Out of this dynamic has emerged an interesting political coalition, members of which are here today. They are wary of the surveillance society developing out of the crisis of September 11th, and coinciding with the technology explosion that we're all experiencing. These advocates for individual rights have found common cause in the defense of privacy against new Government domestic spying initiatives. These initiatives are likely to become permanent fixtures of American life, unless the American people mobilize and voice their concerns and opposition.

My fellow advocates come from across the political spectrum, from free market, limited Government conservatives, to civil rights activists, social justice progressives, and while they continue to disagree on a great many things, one thing is clear, privacy rights should be fundamental in a thriving democratic society.

Over the last two years, we've had plenty to keep us busy. From Total Information Awareness, now called Terrorism Information Awareness, the Data Mining System at the Pentagon, to the secret searches and broad access to personal records authorized in the USA PATRIOT Act, principled privacy hawks, as I like to call my colleagues, have loads to worry about. Today I'm pleased to stand with my friends on the right and the left, to challenge the logic and effectiveness of the Transportation Security Administrations latest adventure in intrusion, the Computer- Assisted Passenger Pre-screening System commonly known as CAPPS II. And I just want to add that this system will affect every single person who gets on an airplane in the United States. And, in some cases, airplanes coming from abroad to the United States.

Before I get into the latest developments in the CAPPS II controversy, I'd like to recognize our panel today and a hearty welcome goes to David Keen, who is President of the American Conservative Union. Waive your hand, David. Grover Norquist, President of Americans for Tax Reform. James Extensive, President of the Center for Democracy and Technology. Hilary Shelton, who is head of the NAACP's Washington bureau will be joining us soon. And, of course, my good friend, former Congressman Bob Barr. Thank you all for being here.

Intended as an upgrade of the original passenger profiling system, CAPPS II, which profiles air passengers based on things like whether you bought a one-way ticket or are paying cash. CAPPS II as envisioned would be a quantum leap in Government surveillance. As was originally laid out by the Transportation Security Administration, this profiling technology would use highly personal commercial and Government information, including credit records, to assess an individual traveler's threat level. So you'd be given a designation. You would be coded red, yellow, or green. Greens would be allowed to pass; yellows would be subjected to heightened scrutiny; and reds would presumably be pulled aside and detained.

The problems with such an approach are obvious. First, it would be ineffective. Anyone could sail through the system using somebody else's name and address. Study after study has shown that identity theft is not a difficult proposition these days.

Second, it could create a blacklist of airline passengers, who, for whatever reason, have a scarlet letter of potential threat forever imprinted in their commercial and Government data fingerprints.

Third, it invites mission creep, not only in the expansion of the data that is collected, but also expansion for the purposes for which it is used. I've never seen a database that Congress hasn't attempted to expand, including the Social Security number which is used to -- originated to give Social Security benefits and identify us individually. And we all know how the Social Security number has been used and misused.

Fourth, like Total Information Awareness or Terrorism Information Awareness and the ill fated citizen spying program Operation Tips that Congress beat back, the Computer-Assisted Passenger Profiling System is based on the flawed premise that to catch the terrorists, we have to mine deep into law-abiding Americans' personal information. Remember that safety and privacy need not be mutually exclusive. Rational, right-minded security measures, like luggage matching, fortifying cockpit doors, better training for airport security personnel can be put in place without sacrificing democratic principles.

Finally, CAPPS II also raises the specter of potential racial, ethnic, or religious discrimination, a point that hasn't been widely reported by the press or acknowledged by the system's boosters and detractors. In fairness to the TSA, it is important to note that it has made changes to the CAPPS concept and we'll get into that a little later. But, despite its best intentions, the changes do not reach to the heart of why this program is dangerous to our freedom.

Earlier this summer, the agency put out new proposed rules governing how CAPPS II would delve into passengers' private data. Claiming it would no longer access credit records and would only use commercial information to help verify name, address and date of birth, the Transportation Security Administration still intends to use highly classified intelligence and law enforcement data to measure our individual threat levels.

This is like a black box of secret data, the contents of which would be unknown even to the Transportation Security Administration. And it negates any progress made in their proposed rule changes. In other words, credit records, highly personal medical, business, educational, and mental health information could still conceivably be mined, but in the secret world of national intelligence and federal law enforcement agencies.

We will not know what the FBI, what the State Department, what the Homeland Security Agency, what the Pentagon, what the CIA has collected about us and this information will help determine your security threat level. Once identified by the system, someone falsely identified as a yellow would have no recourse to correct mistaken information in this black box, dooming that traveler to a TSA blacklist and a traveler's nightmare.

As we've touched on in our widely read report, Bigger Monsters, Weaker Chains, the Growth of an American Surveillance Society, available on line at , CAPPS II and its cousin surveillance tools like the terrorism information, TIA, represent a far more disturbing prospect than just an eye in the sky, no pun intended, at American airports. Indeed, CAPPS II is the logical outgrowth of the bureaucratic fixation on technological quick fixes to highly complicated, international and domestic security problems. And it takes its cue from the private sector. For years commercial enterprises doing market research have collected, compiled, and organized highly detailed information about American consumer appetites. Any of us who use credit cards have a profile somewhere in the private sector.

However, CAPPS II and its ilk take that market phenomenon in a truly radical direction. By taking the first steps toward linking commercial data, collected by appropriately named data aggregaters like Choice Point or Axicom, with our vast and well-resourced national security infrastructure, a system on CAPPS II represents the emerging ability of the Government to see and access our entire lives in very crystal clear, high resolution.

Everything from a preference for Advil over Tylenol, to participation in anti-war rally in 1969, to a subscription to the Economist, to membership in the ACLU or ACU becomes available like total recall, at a moment's notice, with such a synergy of surveillance, using these high speed databases.

But, there's a larger point, one especially well taken by my conservative friends on the dias today, unlike corporations, the Government is uniquely positioned to take our liberty based on its surveillance. Only the Government can put us in jail and deny us due process of law, the right to counsel, and the ability to break into our homes, legally, solely rests with the Government. Only the Government can use national security to erode centuries old free institutions that have nothing to do with protecting us from terrorists.

On its own, the call at dinnertime from the always cheerful telemarketer might be annoying, but when the market targeting that tells that telemarketer who to call is combined with Government snooping, the potential for catastrophic abuse becomes almost a certainty.

CAPPS II, TIA, Operation Tips and the USA PATRIOT Acts expanded surveillance provisions are all fruit of that same poisoned tree. They are all quick fixes designed to placate an American electorate understandably fearful of terrorism. But, not only will they fail to work, they will institutionalize an America not of the free, but of the watched.

Thank you again and we'll now hear from Congressman Barr. And after we hear from the other panelists, we will open it up to questions for the rest of the forum. Thank you.

MR. BARR: Thank you, Laura. Good morning and thank you all very much for being here today to discuss, as we did at a similar forum also sponsored by the ACLU, several weeks ago, some matters regarding the Bill of Rights and our right to privacy in this country, that are of fundamental importance to all of us in this room and all law-abiding American citizens.

At the threshold I'd like to once again thank Laura Murphy and the staff of the ACLU, in particular, its Washington office, but not just its Washington office, for their continued leadership on these issues. And I'd like to thank my colleagues that are with us here today and many others that have been working these issues diligently, whether its in a series of townhall meetings that the ACLU has sponsored, or other forums, or writing op ed pieces and so forth, testifying in the Congress, as Jim Dempsey and Laura did, along with myself several weeks ago, to try and educate the American public as to the very, very serious threats to our Bill of Rights, our liberties, and our right to privacy that are being engendered by these recent and planned laws, regulations, and programs by the Federal Government, both directly, such as the CAPPS II program, as well as indirectly, by providing grants to State and local agencies, for example, the Matrix program that you all might have read about just a couple of weeks ago, to gather evidence on law-abiding citizens in the vain hope that this will somehow magically identify terrorists.

And, of course, what we're doing, if we allow the Government to continue down this road of gathering evidence on law-abiding citizens, with no reasonable basis whatsoever to believe that they have engaged in criminal activity, such as would trigger the normal standard under the Fourth Amendment to gather evidence, then we will have completed eroded the very foundation of the Fourth Amendment and with it, the entire right to privacy on which the Bill of Rights and, indeed, our way of life as a civilized society exists.

The assault on privacy continues through the proposed CAPPS II program that was let for public comment just a few weeks ago. And indeed, this is the time during that 60-day period, from, I believe it was July 30 or 31st, when the proposal, the Privacy Notice was first made public, that all of us, all concerned Americans ought to take advantage of the provisions in that notice, and submit comments to the Department of Homeland Security, as the parent agency for the Transportation Security Administration, and let them know, both agencies know, how deeply we care about the potential and real assault on privacy reflected and represented by these and other programs.

But, focusing just, for example, on the CAPPS II program, there are many troubling aspects to what we see the Government proposing to do in the CAPPS II proposal. For example, even though assurances continue to be given to those of us who have raised concerns about the CAPPS II proposal, that there would not be, as part of the CAPPS II authority, the ability and the charge to identify individuals against whom or on whom an outstanding local or State warrant might be had. That, indeed, is part of the current proposal. So therefore, it is entirely foreseeable that an individual against whom a relatively minor, for example, assault or some other charge might be outstanding at the State or local level, could find themselves, simply by calling in or visiting a ticket counter for an airline, to purchase an airline ticket, to exercise their right to travel in this country, could find themselves detained.

We don't know exactly how this would work, whether the ticket agents would be somehow empowered as Marshals or whatnot, or whether they would physically detain the person, if he or she were there, call the Federal authorities to ensnare this person or whatever. But, this raises a whole new set of issues about the responsibility of both the Federal Government and the private entity, that is, the airline or the ticket agent, as an agent to enforce Government warrants.

The point is not that people against whom there are outstanding warrants should not be detained; the point is, there is a proper and legitimate way to do so in a Federalist system which comports with the Constitution, and that particular proposal in the CAPPS II system raises very serious concerns. As an off-shoot of that, but underlying much of what we see in the CAPPS II system is another problem and that is, the extent to which the data that is accumulated, analyzed, stored and so forth, in the CAPPS II system, would be shared with other agencies, Federal agencies, State agencies, local agencies, and private entities.

I would draw your attention to a study that was just published a few months ago by the General Accounting Office, GAO. The subject of this study which came out in, I think, late April or early May of 2003 on information technology, concerned terrorists watch lists, and the extent to which the Government was or should be coordinating information. Of particular concern, when I looked at this, was the fact that the TSA, Transportation Security Administration, which would be in charge of both developing and implementing the CAPPS II system, already shares significant portions of its data, not just with other Federal agencies, but with State agencies, local agencies, and private entities. This is a concern already under the current CAPPS system and we don't have assurances yet that this would not somehow work its way into the CAPPS II system. As a matter of fact, logic tells us that it would be even more of a concern with the expanded breadth of the CAPPS II system.

Jim Dempsey here is certainly much more of an expert on the technical aspects of all this, the technical aspects, for example, including error rates. Even if one presumes a very, very favorable error rate of one or two percent, and databases of the magnitude of the CAPPS II system as envisioned by the CAPPS II proposal, traditionally have error rates much in excess of one or two percent. It's not at all uncommon in a database of the size that we're talking about here to have an error rate of 20 or more percent. But, even if you presume the Government does an absolutely topnotch, squeaky-clean job of scrubbing its system so there are virtually no errors in it, where you have a traveling system, a transportation system in which somewhat in excess, I believe, of about two and a half million people per day fly the skies of America, both domestically, as well as leaving the country or coming into the country, even with an unrealistically low error rate of one or two percent, you can quickly see the magnitude of the problem in terms of perhaps false positives, people being targeted improperly simply because they have a credit history, for example, that's different from the norm, they don't have a credit history for example.

These are all very serious problems that have come to our mind, both individually and collectively, as we have looked at the proposal. We are in the process, again, as individuals and representing different organizations, drafting up comments to get into the Department of Homeland Security and the TSA over the coming weeks.

But, I would take this opportunity to urge everybody here and everybody that you know who has some concern over what is happening here, not just in terms, specifically of CAPPS II, but in terms of how this fits into the overall assault on privacy represented by these and other measures, some of which the Attorney General touched on in his Whistle Stop Tour last week, others which came to light the week before and the publicity surrounding the Matrix Program, others which came to light when the Otter Amendment was voted on in the House a couple of weeks before that and so forth.

Please, take a look at these proposals, the material that is being submitted and either submit your own or encourage folks that you know that are involved with organizations that really follow these issues to do so. Because we have an opportunity, I believe, to, at least, try and have some changes made to what seems to be a very anti-privacy or privacy unfriendly, as it were, system that is being implemented here.

And I'll look forward to answering any questions, along with others. And I want to again thank Laura Murphy and the ACLU for its leadership on this issue.

MS. MURPHY: Thank you. Jim.

MR. DEMPSEY: Good morning. I'm Jim Dempsey. I'm Executive Director of The Center for Democracy and Technology, a non-profit civil liberties organization based here in Washington, D.C. I want to thank Laura Murphy and the ACLU for sponsoring this press conference on this important subject. And thank all the members of the panel today for their labor on this and many other issues and for the fine collaboration that we've been able to develop across the political, ideological spectrum. The issue of privacy brings us all together today as it has on other issues.

Now, nobody here can doubt, nobody on the panel doubts that there is a very real threat of terrorism faced by this country. I have no doubt, I think nobody should have any doubt that there are people in this country today planning terrorist attacks and very likely planning terrorist attacks against passenger airplanes. It's too inviting a target. They've shown that they will go back again to the same targets and to the same methodologies. And so we need a strong air-safety program. And nothing we say here today suggests otherwise.

It's also clear that the current CAPPS I passenger system is ineffective. It is the very same system that was in place on September 11th, so it's by definition ineffective. It hasn't really been changed since then. The no-fly list or no-fly lists, as we now know, are ineffective. The ACLU, through its litigation efforts, has uncovered that there are actually two no-fly lists, one of them 88 pages long of names. And those of us who fly, as most do, have experienced the sort of arbitrariness or apparent limitations of the current air-traffic passenger screening system. So we need a CAPPS II. But the question is, how to design it. And that's what we're arguing about. And, as Laura Murphy indicated, the first question is the question of effectiveness. Will it, in fact, work? And the TSA claims that it is now in a testing phase, when it issued its CAPPS II notice.

At the end of July, it said it was moving into a testing phase and one of the issues to be tested was effectiveness. This is something very, very hard for citizens and even those of us who live sort of inside the Beltway advocacy community to judge. A lot of this is done behind the scenes.

I urge Congress and the relevant oversight committees to really keep the pressure on the TSA on the question of effectiveness. But we're not going to suspend our judgement on that question either, because one of the themes that Laura Murphy sounded, and I think that all of us share, is that there is not a necessary conflict between the civil liberties values that we're espousing today and the national security and public safety and law enforcement goals that CAPPS II represents. In fact, the two very much go together. And a lot of our comments and a lot of our criticisms of CAPPS II from a civil liberties standpoint actually also go to this bottom-line question of effectiveness.

The basic -- we have a set of basic privacy principles. They're really fair information principles. And more than just what's secret or what's private, but how is information used, and collected, and shared about people, particularly in this digital age, when so information is generated about us in our daily lives with our use of credit cards and other kinds of identifiers. And the basic fair information principles say, collect no more information than is needed to do the job, use it only for the purpose at hand, and keep it for no longer than is necessary to fulfill that mission.

Now, between the first CAP -- TSA, before it became part of the Department of Homeland Security, back in January, issued a first CAPPS II Privacy Notice. And between that time and the second notice in July, there were a series of discussions, most of them behind closed doors, with some privacy groups and some industry experts and some technology experts. And it had seemed to me, at least, that TSA was making progress in answering these privacy concerns and thereby, making the system more effective by keeping it narrowly focused.

And unfortunately, something got lost as the Privacy Act Notice, which was really more than just a Privacy Act Notice. The Privacy Act Notice was really one of the, sort of, focal points of the debate and one of the ways that the administration is expressing what CAPPS II is about and how it will work. And the process of defining CAPPS II, for all kinds of purposes, is being played out in the Privacy Act Notice.

Something got lost in terms of the focus of the system. And we saw, first of all, what we all had feared, which was mission creep, that a system that is supposed to be designed to protect that aircraft from people who would do it harm, was suddenly expanded to include not only international terrorists, but domestic terrorists. And there's a logic to that, although we don't really have the threat on the domestic terrorist side. Right away you get into some very, very difficult questions about anti-abortion activists or environmental activists and whether they're terrorists. Right away you get into anti-war demonstrators, anti-Iraq war and whether they're terrorists.

But also, it's expanded to include other kinds of crimes in an effort to try to identify criminals who had no threat, who were suspected of posing no threat to air transport safety, but who happened to be passing through that gate and suddenly someone said, well it's a great idea to try use this system to catch those criminals. And it's a tantalizing concept, two million people a day passing through the system. But, every time you put more information into the system, every time you put more missions into the system, the risk of error, the risk of mistake, the risk of abuse increases.

Secondly, to some extent, the notice has -- it's written in sort of wiggle-room language, says that they will collect the passenger name record. And previously we had been assured it would only be name, date of birth, address, and phone number. Now, it's a passenger name record, including name, address, date of birth, and telephone number, which means other data as well. And it will be shared with agencies including such and such and such and such. So you see the wiggle-room already there so that someone can come along later and add that other purpose.

I have two other, just sort of themes, that I want to sound in terms of why we're looking at this with such intensity, aside from the danger of terrorism, opposed by the air transport industry, to the air transport industry. One is, of course, the theme here, the merging of private and governmental data bases and the cross-fertilization between these private sector and commercial databases. The age of the massive database, the one big brother in the sky, that's long since gone. Now, with the capability of technology, databases can be linked. The Government never has to acquire the information. It can reach out to the information in these various industry databases. And we have not yet developed the laws and the rules that explain how data quality is handled, how redress is handled, how you know what's going on and what's being used against you and who you can complain to.

Secondly, is the issue of gates and how we treat the gates in our society. We all pass through gates. The one at issue here, of course, is a literal gate, the gate to the airplane. But, increasingly, I think we are going to be seeing Government efforts to look at how those gates are controlled. On August 15th, it didn't get much notice, probably cause it was August 15th, the Transportation Security Administration published a notice saying that they were going to be increasing or developing plans to increase bus passenger safety. And they explicitly say in there that among the things they're going to be looking at is passenger screening. So there's another gate. Another gate where this kind of capability and this kind of screening technology is being looked at.

So moving forward, we're going to be, CDT, filing comments, as many of the other groups are. We're going to be working closely, if we can, with the Transportation Security Administration, in dialogue with them and with the industry to try to re-emphasize the theme that privacy and civil liberties on the one hand, and security and the other hand are not at odds here, that the basic principles of keeping the amount of information collected narrow, keeping the mission narrow, holding that information for no longer than is necessary, that's the way to achieve the best improvements in air transport safety and to protect civil rights and civil liberties.

Thank you very much, all, for coming today and thank you again, Laura, for convening this press conference.

MS. MURPHY: You're welcome.

MR. SHELTON: Good morning. My name is Hilary Shelton, Director of the NAACP's Washington bureau. On behalf of the NAACP, our nation's oldest and largest civil rights organization, with over 500,000 card carrying members, 1,700 branches, located in every State in the Union, I'm honored to share our deeply held appreciation to the American Civil Liberties Union and all the other organizations, associations, and individuals gathered here today.

As you can easily see, our ideological prospectives run a very broad spectrum. We are assembled here today to state our grave concerns with some very problematic provisions contained in the Computer-Assisted Passenger Pre-Screening System, what we call CAPPS II. The new Transportation Security Agency CAPPS proposal, as described in the August 2003 Federal Register, is rife with problems that could have a potential discriminatory affect on low-income airline passengers or airline passengers of color.

Specifically, the CAPPS II proposal would create a black box scenario in which personal, consumer, and criminal justice information, and history is fed into a computer program out of which each passenger's security risk is assessed based on this information.

Given our nation's sorry history, when dealing with ethnic and racial minority Americans of color, our very -- we are very leery of such a black box and, of course, this is no exception. The NAACP is gravely concerned that we do not know what exactly is going into the black box and how much weight is being given to each component. Many factors which may on their face appear non-biased are in fact quite discriminatory. For example, some companies that provide commercial credit scoring to various credit reporting services would not validate exactly what goes into the credit scoring process. Argue that indeed their litmus to consider their own -- it's considered their own intellectual property. As such, even the data being considered under the new CAPPS system will be information that cannot necessarily be substantiated as accurate or truthful and has been shown to be discriminatory against racial and ethnic minority people.

Another concern is that much of the most basic personal data that will be collected under CAPPS II is also weighted unfairly against ethnic and racial minority Americans, as well as low-income Americans. Low-income Americans, as well as racial and ethnic minorities tend to move more often than their white counterparts. Furthermore, as to looking at the use of the names, Islam is quite frankly the fastest growing religion in the African-American community. As such, large numbers of African- Americans have begun to change their names in accordance with their new found religion. Names like Leroy Jones and Rene Washington are now being changed to Mohammed Ali or Rene Akbar. The NAACP is opposed to any Government system which constrains an individual's right to travel, simply because he or she has adopted a new religion, moved recently or has a less than stellar credit history.

The one aspect of CAPPS II that further compounds our problems is the lack of due process for notification, corrections or appeals to the data that comes out of the black box. Thus, the NAACP stands strongly in support of coalition partners in our unified call for systems that help maintain our nations security, but not at the expense of our freedom of our people to travel without intimidation or indeed unfair interference.

MS. MURPHY: David.

MR. KEEN: My name is David Keen, I'm Chairman of the American Conservative Union. The American Conservative Union has been concerned since the September 11th, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, that in a well-meaning desire to protect the American homeland, Government officials would dream up and implement proposals to protect us without seriously considering the implication of those proposals.

History has demonstrated that in times of crisis, Americans are all too willing to trade liberty for security and that Government and law enforcement officials are all too willing to broker that trade. Less than a week after September 11th, we warned of just this sort of thing and I stand by what we said at that time. I'm quoting. "Like most Americans, I'm more than prepared to live with the inconveniences that will accompany the implementation of reasonable and prudent measures designed to make a hijacker's job more difficult in the future.

But, I'm not willing to grant, even for a minute, that what happened last week justifies the scraping of traditional American liberties and Constitutional safeguards. In the aftermath of the attacks, many were quick to suggest that life as we've known it in this country will be forever changed and that we must be prepared as a people to sacrifice our privacy and a measure of our civil liberties in a quest for greater security."

I continue to support, as do most Americans, reasonable and prudent measures designed to enhance security. But, it is clear that in their zeal to protect us, many in the administration in the Congress are going beyond the reasonable and the prudent and treading on truly dangerous ground. This is not meant as a condemnation of their motives. I reject the all too cynical notion that the Attorney General, the Director of Homeland Security, and the President have been or are conspiring to gleefully strip us of our freedoms. They're trying to do a difficult job and deserve our support in their effort to do that job. That does not mean, however, that we should simply accept their every suggestion as to what might or might not be in our interests as a people.

As free citizens, we have an obligation to view any proposal infringing on our liberties, not cynically, but with deep skepticism. The Department of Homeland Security was formed, we are told, because of the need for an agency that would focus in a laser like way on the protecting the U.S. homeland from international terrorists. DHS was not to be just another law enforcement agency, but was to pursue a discrete and vitally important mission to protect us from terrorism. Now, however, it's becoming increasingly apparent that Governor Ridge and his colleagues are acting like any other bureaucrats. They're claiming responsibilities beyond those they originally sought to accomplish, missions not originally contemplated. The CAPPS II program as currently envisioned is a potentially dangerous reflection of this.

Putting aside for a moment the question of whether Government should be able to do all that would be possible, should CAPPS II in its present incarnation be put into operation, we should first ask whether the expanded mission that the Transportation Security Agency and DHS are claiming as their own is necessary or consistent with the popular and Congressional mandates that led to setting up the department in the first place.

It's clear that CAPPS II will be used for far more than to simply ensure the security of air travel. It will be used, as the TSA privacy notification of a few weeks ago makes clear, for other "general" law enforcement purposes. This I would submit weakens rather than strengthens the purposes for which it was developed. We have a Justice Department, a Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Immigration and Customs Agency, and local police agencies already charged with fighting traditional crime. The Transportation Security Agency should restrict itself to the mission for which it was established and should, in fact, go back to the drawing board to redesign the CAPPS II system to conform both to the traditional rights of Americans and to the mission the agency was established to carry out.

Now, there are those who will be watching this and say, how does this affect me. A few weeks ago, Bob Barr and I went to the Transportation Security Agency and were briefed on CAPPS II. Admiral Lowey, who I think shares some of our concerns, said, I don't know why people are all that concerned, because we don't think that more than 400 or 500 people a year will turn up red under this system, which means that they won't be allowed access to air travel.

My question to him, however, elicited a different answer. I said, I'd worry about the people who turn up yellow, those are the people who are going to be subjected to increased scrutiny, above what they now get when they travel on aircraft and who are going to be harassed every time they travel.

He said, well, we don't think it will be more than eight percent of the total passenger load. One of the other speakers here this morning indicated that more than two and one half million people board commercial aircraft in this country every day. Multiply eight times two and a half, times 365 and you get something on the order of 73 million people being subjected to increased scrutiny each and every year. That means everyone who flies is affected by this in very serious ways.

The organizations before you are submitting comments on our concerns about protecting privacy as we ensure security. But, every person watching this press conference who contemplates flying should also submit those comments. That can be done online to privacy@ or comments can be submitted to the privacy officer at the Department of Homeland Security, Washington, D.C. 20528. And I would urge that everyone watching this panel submit their concerns and their comments on this privacy notice. Thank you.

MR. NORQUIST: Hi. Grover Norquist with the Americans for Tax Reform. I too urge everyone to, who is listening or watching, to send your comments in, because this can be stopped or amended and it's important to do so. And all of us who care about privacy in this country should be deeply concerned about CAPPS II as one of a series of police power and informational privacy grabs that have flowed from September 11th.

But, again, many of these things were in the wish list of the prosecutors, and the police, and the FBI long before September 11th. There's the old story of the fellow who is looking for his car keys under the streetlight and someone comes and asks if he can help. And they look for another half hour and they don't find the keys. And he says, you're sure you dropped them here and he said, no, I dropped them further down the road, but the light is better here.

We're all familiar with the police who seem to spend an awful lot of time ticketing honest citizens, rather than going after bank robbers. It is always easier for the Government to go after honest citizens, they're much better behaved, they're much less dangerous. And to sweep -- this CAPPS sweep for general information from the American citizens is unfortunately going to be done, instead of some of the things that might actually be effective in going after would-be terrorists.

CAPPS is a bad idea that will collapse into bigger, worse ideas. It's been discussed that if you're only asked for four pieces of, where you live and your name and so on, that identity theft would be a problem. Well, then there's going to have to be a CAPPS III to fix that possibility of identity theft and a national ID card is the obvious step in that direction. What is the information that's going to be in this black box? Is the Federal Government or the State Government going to want to know about the personal ownership of firearms? Is this a back door attack on the Second Amendment? If you're concerned about the Second amendment, you ought to be concerned about CAPPS II.

One of the, to my knowledge, the only civil liberties commitment that Bush made when he was running for President was his commitment to get rid of the secret evidence, the misuse of secret evidence laws, where foreign governments would hand cheerful information to the United States, to use secretly against, in this case, as they were suppose to be people who weren't yet citizens, but then this would be used and you could be detained, and arrested, and when you asked what it was about, they would tell you it was a secret.

And there have been several very, excuse me, tragic cases where some bad information, mis-information was used. And people spent years in prison based on phoney information that came from overseas. If you're an Indian-American, would you really like the U.S. Government to be operating with Pakistani intelligence in that black box? And you can fill in your own -- the problems that this would flow as foreign intelligence. It could either become as bad information, lousy information, stuff about uranium from Niger. That foreign information could flow into these black boxes and affect anyone's lives here.

And again, focusing on this gets us away from the real fixes that are necessary. I mean, how come we keep reading in the paper that the one thing that would have stopped September 11th, four pilots with four guns isn't being implemented, and that we aren't getting armed pilots, and that they're slow on getting those doors, cockpit doors fixed.

That said, I'd just like to leave with one thought and that is, people have stopped saying, how come you have this conservative, liberal coalition three or four years ago. And when we started getting together with some of the power grabs that the Clinton administration wanted, everyone sort of thought it was weird, or different, or odd that the ACLU and a tax group for the American Conservative Union would be getting together. I think it's extremely healthy for the country that nobody thinks that's odd anymore. Thank you.

MS. MURPHY: We have a microphone, an open mic for reporters who are with us telephonically, so we will be taking questions from reporters in the audience, as well as telephonic questions. So if there are questions, please raise your hand and identify your news outlet. Yes.

MR. MOORSTEIN: Al Moorstein affiliated with the Washington Independent Writers and Solution Radio. Do any of you have familiarity with the way Israel or any other nation that has seriously been fighting terrorism longer than we have deals with passenger screening?

And since we haven't had a major terrorist incident inside the United States since 9/11, can't we become deceived, complacent, or careless?

MS. MURPHY: Yes. David Keen, American Conservative Union.

MR. KEEN: I'm not intimately familiar with all of the measures that Israel takes. I have flown El-Al, their airline and you undergo a great deal of -- you undergo a personal interview in the presence of, I believe, a psychologist and some security officers.

There's a big difference between an airline that flies a few flights and the American air transportation system, which as I indicated in my remarks, boards two and a half million people every day. In one sense, that's a system that's much harder to protect, in another sense, it's a system that because of its size, can't really tolerate the kinds of scrutiny that a small operation like El-Al can in fact tolerate. In addition, Israel has got security concerns far greater than ours. In Israel itself, as people who follow the politics there know, that there are constant charges of misuse of the information that's collected. The very kinds of concerns that we're talking about here.

Yes. There's a continuing danger. I think several speakers talked about that. I think all of us support reasonable means to protect Americans. Grover talked about the slowness with which they're adopting armed pilots, the dragging of the feet on securing the cockpit doors, various things that could be done, that are not being done, in preference to saying that the bigger solution is the bigger budget, more intrusive way of dealing with passengers.

So I don't think anything that anybody here says should be taken either as a sign that we are not cognizant, as most Americans are, of the dangers that we face, but what it is, is a warning that when you face dangers, you don't give everything up as a result of facing them. The day after September 11th, the Secretary of Defense warned that one of the things we do not want to do is buckle into the terrorists by giving up our traditional freedoms, and acting simply in response to what they've done. And in many cases I'm afraid that is what we're doing.

MS. MURPHY: Sir, you had your hand up.

MR. HUGHES: Hi. I'm John Hughes from Bloomberg. Are you saying kill CAPPS II period or are you saying reform it? And if you're saying reform it, what should CAPPS II include?

MS. MURPHY: Well, I'll take the first crack at that question. The ACLU is troubled with the premise of CAPPS II, that if you keep information on all law-abiding citizens who travel, then you're in effect treating them as suspected criminals.

And we think that the notion that CAPPS II, by gathering up information on everyone, we will be able to find out the criminals is flawed or the terrorists, because we look at the commissions that have studied what happened before 9/11 and we know that law enforcement had some very solid leads about people who were taking flight lessons, who were suspect, they had leads about Mousaoui. And this runs counter to the standard notion of law enforcement, which is to investigate leads, individualize suspicion and follow up on those individual leads. We can't put everyone under a microscope and even if we choose to do that, the results will not be accurate and fair, given the flaws in our private commercial databases, as well as the secrecy of the information in our Government databases.

So at this point we can't see a way to support any program that is so invasive, that threatens to become a permanent fixture. And because of our experiences with mission creep, with other databases, whether it's a legitimate databases, perhaps for searching down deadbeat dads or other welfare roles, we've seen, every time Congress had had access to this or knows of the existence of these databases, they've tried to use these databases for a very different purpose than what they were established for.

So we're very troubled. But, I don't want to speak for everybody on the panel, if others think that this program can be salvaged. Mr. Barr.

MR. BARR: Thank you, Laura. I'm not sure that it can be or it can't be at this point. The concerns that we have are fundamental. They go not only to the specifics of what CAPPS II is proposed as set forth in the privacy notice, and there certainly are some specific steps that I and probably others intend to recommend to the Department of Homeland Security that address some of those specific concerns. The more fundamental question is the question of approach.

Is a system that is, as Laura just said, collects data on everybody that travels, actually, it's more than everybody that travels. All of these people that have traveled will be in the system as well, I presume, as well as everybody, as currently configured, that has some sort of warrant outstanding against them. So it will be a massive database. Whether or not enough safeguards can be placed in that system, using that approach is highly problematic. I'm not sure that they can.

My preference would be a system that has a much more effective foreign intelligence component, which is something that has not been addressed in all this. It was touched on in the report that came out just a couple of weeks ago, with some notable exceptions of 22 pages that remained classified, of the report on 9/11.

But, a system that simply takes the name of somebody seeking to travel and compares that to a bonifide list of terrorists and associates of known terrorists is something that I think is reasonable, and would be much more effective, both cost effective, as well as effective in terms of catching the bad guys, as opposed to just inconveniencing, harassing, and possibly catching the good guys.

MS. MURPHY: Jim.

MR. DEMPSEY: It's CDT's view that we need a CAPPS and we need a CAPPS that is better than CAPPS I. If we're not going to go to the Israeli route, which is to intensively question every single passenger, and the judgment so far, I think settled judgment of the Transportation Security Administration is that an Israeli type system is not practical in the United States, as David suggested, just because of the question of volume. I think the Israeli system may also be even more susceptible to the kinds of profiling or racial bias kinds of issues that Hilary and all of us are worried about.

If you're not going to have that kind of system, you need some way to single out who gets more than just going through the metal detector and having your carry-on go through the x-ray machine. You need to have some way to narrow your focus. And that involves making judgments about people. Now, what should be in there, the number one thing that should be in there is, the names of known terrorists. Two of the 19 people on September 11th were known to the Government. I think none of us on the panel, maybe some of know, I personally don't know whether their two names were even on the do not fly list. But, clearly they were not singled out. They were not made available for the more intensive scrutiny. The demonstration has been shown that if you had known those two people were flying, you could immediately have checked and identified a fair number of the other 19 passengers, 19 hijackers as being associated with them.

So let's get the system up, that the people we know are highly suspect or terrorists, can be identified. I'm afraid that CAPPS II -- it has that element to it, absolutely. That should be the core of the CAPPS II. It also has this effort to try to predict or identify the unknowns and that's where you get into this sort of black box of prediction, and intelligence, and the merging of all kinds of information. That's where the effectiveness question looms large.

But I want to make this work. I don't want to trash. That's the CDT position.

MS. MURPHY: David did you or Hilary or Grover?

MR. KEEN: Well, I sort of agree with everybody, being an agreeable fellow. I mean, I think it's clear that CAPPS I does not work and if you want to improve what you're doing, and obviously if you could say absolutely here are the characteristics that make up a terrorist, then we'd probably all agree that that would be fine and we'd only be picking up terrorists.

The problem which I think that you got into in your comments is that they don't stop there. The reason that 73 million people are going to be scrutinized is because -- is that this system is not designed just to get potential terrorists. It's being designed as a general law enforcement tool and the wider and bigger the net that you cast, the more people you're going to bring in on it. If you're going to devise a system that is to protect airline passengers from terrorists who might seize an aircraft, then the tools that you design should be limited to that and they shouldn't be used for other things, because that necessarily means a wider net bringing in more people.

Under the current CAPPS II proposal, and I'm not arguing that any of these are good people that might -- that you were enlarging the net, but sometimes it's important to know who and how wrongdoers should be pursued. If there's somebody who has a State warrant out for domestic violence, for example, and God knows there must be millions of those people, men and women in our gender-neutral society, those are the kinds of people that CAPPS II would catch in their net.

Is that evidence, is there statistical or psychological evidence that somebody who has mistreated their spouse is liable in the next step to seize an aircraft? That's a less direct consequence than saying, if you smoke marijuana, you're going to use heroin. I don't know that these are connected.

And if we're designing a system to protect travel, if we have an agency that's designed to protect us from terrorists, then it ought to get on with that job and not spend its time thinking about and planning to do everyone else's job. I think that's the way you approach these things.

MS. MURPHY: We have a call from the telephone, a question. Do we? No? Okay. All right. Then we'll take more questions from the audience.

MS. LOWDOWSKI: I'm Beth Lowdowski from CNN.  -- is saying that she will be the contact person or her office will be the contact person for redress, that there is going to be an avenue of redress. There already is an avenue of redress, which is some of these people that are on, like their names are watch list names, have been writing into the TSA now, filling out forms, you know, going through a process of trying to clear their names.

Do you have issues with that? Do you think that could work? Would you like to see something different?

MS. MURPHY: Well, people are going to be rated by the Government intelligence agencies. And TSA is not going to have access, as far as the CAPPS system is structured now, to go behind the basis of that rating. If it comes from the FBI or the CIA, TSA will only be able to tell you that you've been given this rating that's led to you being in the yellow or red category. They will not be able to tell you why. And the Government is saying they reserve the right to keep that information secret, so that they don't have to be accountable for what goes into this secret black box that we keep referring to in all of our remarks.

So the TSA due process, so if you want to go to TSA and find out the basis for your yellow designation, which is probably the most likely designation for flyers to come out of this program, TSA will not be able to go behind the information and share that with you, the individual, because that information will be rated secret or, you know, secret for national security purposes, etc.

So I don't think that there's a true due process system. David.

MR. KEEN: I just want to expand on that for a second. Because the analogy that's often been used by Government officials in describing CAPPS II and the rating system is the -- is your credit rating.

When you go to get a ticket, you're rated red, yellow or green, based upon a score that you get, which in turn is based upon a profile that they design of what kind of person they're looking for on that day. At the airport, the only thing, as Laura said, that anyone knows there is what your rating was. The problem is, if you attempt to appeal it on national security grounds, they can't tell you or won't tell you what went into that rating.

So it's a little bit like the old days, when you applied for a mortgage and you didn't get it, but nobody would show you the credit data. So there was no real appeal. At least now in the private markets, if you apply for a mortgage and they turn you down, you can look at your credit report and fix it. You can't look at your security report, because the data that goes into making up the profile is secret based on national security grounds, and TSA doesn't have that information.

MS. MURPHY: All right. Yes. Yes. Sure.

UNKNOWN:  -- false positive. You're saying one or two percent, maybe a name misspelling. You know, on the false positive, short of -- you know, there's some confusion now about this name being very similar, like the David Nelson's of the world. They're saying that there might be a way to redress that, which I think is also part of your, you know, issue with CAPPS II and I'm wondering what you think about that?

MR. KEEN:  That's the problem with CAPPS I, not CAPPS II. That's what the whole system is in a sense designed to fix that. But all kinds of things can go into the profiling. Let's say that, this is absurd of course, but let's say that you -- that the intelligence people say that likely terrorists are like to go to X-kind of club for their night before celebration.

So they can -- so they say, okay, anybody that goes to those kinds of clubs are potentially on the list, that that's part of the profile, they could put that in, or they like to eat at Denny's, whatever. They can check the financial data to find out if you fall within that cluster and that's the kind of thing that could get you up from a green to a yellow and result in additional kinds of scrutiny. It's all kinds of different things.

Before the computer revolution, this still went on. I use the example, I had a friend back in the '70s, who had leased office space in a law firm that got itself rated for dealing with a country that was under sanctions. He knew nothing about it, had no relation to the law firm, traveled to a different part of the world all the time and found himself being strip searched for five years, every time he traveled.

He knew in the back of his mind why he was being strip searched, because he had gotten onto one of those lists, but he couldn't get off and they wouldn't tell him. And it wasn't until there was friendly people in the Government who would look into it, who could fix it. There was nobody then to fix it. Now these mistakes get -- become sort of malignant in these computers and can go to everyone. And once you get on the list, once you're in that cluster, it's very difficult one, to fix it or two, to get off.

We can suggest that perhaps, and this goes to the question of whether people should file comments, things have been delayed because of the protests of these groups and others. And things have gotten a little better. Initially, although we were told that this data wouldn't be saved, the initial draft of their proposal was that it would be saved for 50 years, which I guess in Government terms is almost immediate disposal of the information.

In the current privacy notification, the 50 years has been eliminated to some vague period, so that maybe there's been some improvement. These kinds of criticisms do make a difference. Are they going to make a perfect system? No. Is the system that ultimately comes out at the end going to be something we can support? Maybe, maybe not. But, what we do and the criticisms we make are, I think, very important.

MS. MURPHY: We do have a telephonic question, I believe, right now, at least --

MR. JONES: Yes, I do.

MS. MURPHY: Okay. Yes, you do.

MR. JONES: Yes.

MS. MURPHY: Okay. Please speak up and identify your news outlet.

MR. JONES: Yes. David Jones, calling on behalf of the Nation. Two questions. First, there has been -- I've done some reporting for the Nation and also for -- Times regarding the question of the current CAPPS I program, with regard to harassment or alleged harassment of political activists. There have been a number of cases where there have been allegations that anti-war activists have been harassed while traveling or attempting to travel to protests or just traveling in general for leisure. And there's a suit in San Francisco regarding this question as well. In your conversations with the TSA and Homeland Security people, what have they said about their ability to target particular groups of people, organizations that may be considered dissidents

And what have you uncovered in terms of any potential for what's being done in the future, for people that are anti-Government, being tracked through a system like that?

MS. MURPHY: I'm going to turn this answer over to Barry Steinhardt, who is director of our technology and liberty project for the ACLU. Barry, you can -- Shane can give you a microphone. But before I get to that, there is an ACLU lawsuit in Northern California that through a Freedom of Information Act request revealed that war protestors were being targeted.

But the TSA will not guarantee certain things, like certain categories of people, they will not guarantee that naturalized U.S. citizens from certain Middle Eastern countries won't be given heightened scrutiny. So there are not mechanisms, as far as we can tell, in place that prevent TSA from singling out certain categories or classes of individual that we think create a suspect classification. Barry.

MR. STEINHARDT: Yeah. We do have a suit, our Northern California affiliate has a suit. It involves two peace activists whose names are Rebecca Gordan and Jane Adams, common names, who appears are on the no-fly list. As best we can tell from the documents we were able to get under the Freedom Information Act, they do appear to be on a no-fly list. Our assumption, working assumption is that they are on the no-fly list, because of their political activities.

That is not going to end because of CAPPS II. CAPPS II is going to be a system where, as other people have said this morning, there is this black box, black boxes really, in which there will be lots of information that is massed by the Government in place. We assume, and they have specifically in the Privacy Act Notice, they have left themselves the option of doing this, we assume that the kind of information that led to Rebecca Gordon and Jane Adams being on the existing no-fly lists will wind up in the CAPPS II system.

And there is simply no way off, as Rebecca and Jane have learned, and as we know from CAPPS II. The CAPPS II Privacy Act Notice. There is no due process. The only thing you're going to be able to ask the Government for is the record of whether or not the four pieces of information that you provided were accurately transmitted. You're not going to know what's in the black boxes. You're not going to be able to get off of that list. There is going to be no recourse. It's going to be trust us, we're the Government, we won't do you any harm.

MS. MURPHY: Next question. Yes, sir, please identify yourself.

MR. LINDMAN:  Seth Lindman, NBC News Channel. You're naturally -- as much as you're going to have people who will be horrified by what you're talking about, you're also going to have people who will say, listen, I will accept anything if it means no terrorist attack. That said, really what alternative, I haven't heard one, would work here to prevent terrorist attacks in lieu of the CAPPS system? I haven't heard anything concrete here.

MS. MURPHY: I think that's wrong. You have heard some. Mr. Barr talked about a system that would focus on terrorists. Jim Dempsey talked about a system that would at least allow proper dissemination of known information by the Government to the Transportation Security Administration. For example, we knew about two of those 19 hijackers. Mr. Barr.

MR. LINDMAN:  That leaves 17 hijackers.

MS. MURPHY: I understand that. But, there's no guarantee that this system is going to be designed in a way that will catch those hijackers and not put people who are innocent of anything else at -- under the microscope of the Government.

Let's understand this. This is a search, your background is being seized and searched by the Government. And I think we have something called the Fourth Amendment and we want to live in a society where our personal information remains personal. We're talking about a seismic shift where the Government, as a premise, says that it is entitled to all of this information about us. Mr. Barr.

MR. BARR: I mean, in a general sense, that's the real concern here, that this does irreversible damage to the Fourth Amendment. But in terms of constructive solutions, I think that there have been a number put forth here this morning, as well as by some other groups, focusing on some of the known deficiencies that gave rise to the success of the terrorist attacks on 9/11.

None of which are really addressed by what is -- what we're looking at in CAPPS II. The enhanced security measures. Better equipment at the checkpoints, as you go into the air terminals is a very, very important part of the equation. And I give TSA credit for having done a good job of getting better technical equipment and a much enhanced capability on the part of their personnel to properly recognize things. I give them less credit, because of the arbitrariness that still is -- affects the system. And that's something they have to work on.

What we need to focus on, I think, and this is very clear in the report that came out a couple of weeks ago, is better foreign intelligence, better coordination of intelligence among the different agencies, so that when a person does propose to put themselves forward as a secure or a safe air passenger, their name is checked against a legitimate up-to-date verified watch list that has been coordinated with all of the different Federal and State agencies, that have a piece of the so-called intelligence pie. So that that person, Jane Doe, or John Doe, or David Nelson, or whoever it is, their name is compared to a constantly updated, well coordinated, well based system, watch list that has terrorists and known associates of terrorists on there.

That is the best safeguard that we have. And that, to our mind I think, ought to be what the Government ought to be concentrating on, rather than developing profiles of law-abiding citizens' air traffic patterns or air flight patterns.

MS. MURPHY: Let's remember, the FBI testified right after 9/11 that they did not have the computer capability to do a search of who was taking flying lessons. And so there were fundamental infrastructure problems, both within the FBI and the Immigration and Naturalization Service, who sent work permits to two of the hijackers, after they went down in flames.

And so we know that there are communication problems within these agencies and these are the things that have been pointed to in most of the post-9/11 analyses. And to not -- to shift the subject away from that and not concentrate on adequately fixing those problems, I think is problematic. David.

MR. KEEN: Your question is sort of a fundamental philosophical question in essence. Let's get away from the point of whether or not this proposal will protect us. I mean, part of what we're saying is that the proposal as proposed by the Government won't protect us. But the fact of the matter is, that in the world in which we live, there is no perfect protection. Immediately following September 11th, the man then in charge of Transportation Security met with the airlines and said, my mission is to prevent any American commercial jet from ever again being seized and used as a weapon. And if that means that no commercial jet will ever fly again, that's all right with me.

And from his standpoint, that would accomplish the mission. We can, in an essence, guarantee perfect security with aircraft by not having aircraft. Or we can -- just as you can guarantee that you won't be mugged if you never leave your house. But, in the world in which we live, the real world, everything involves trade-offs. And what we've suggested is that the Government should take those reasonable and prudent steps that it ought to take to protect us to the degree that we can be protected, without changing the nature of our society.

But the fact is, when we get up in the morning and go to work or live our lives, we face a lot of different dangers. We try to minimize those dangers, and I'm not talking just about terrorism, but everything else. We try to minimize those dangers in a way consistent with living the kinds of lives we want to live.

And the question is, what kind of life do we want to live? I remember years ago, before the collapse of the Soviet Union, one of the things that defenders of the Communists there used to say was, you can walk the streets of Moscow and not be mugged. Which was true. It wasn't a very pleasant life, but it was safe, because there was a cop everywhere and because you couldn't do much of anything.

That's not the kind of life that Americans want to lead. We don't want to lead a life in which we can't fly, in which we can't move around, in which we cower fearfully in our homes or our caves. We want to live a life that we expect to live as a free people. And we want to be protected as much as we can, consistent with being able to live that life. And that's where we have to look at these trade-offs skeptically, and ask ourselves, what's worth it and what isn't.

MS. MURPHY: A question from the telephone and then I'll get to the folks in the audience.

MR. KEENMILL: This is Ryan Keenmill with Wire News. I had a question for the folks that seem to think what we need is kind of a better system of a watch list and checking names against it. In substance isn't that simply what we have now, which is CAPPS I?

And you say that there's been quite a few problems where people like David Nelson or a guy named -- or Jane Adams get flagged. In a sense -- and you have a blacklist, you get people that are scared that they're on there, because they're, you know, they're political subversives or -- so I don't understand how that system that you're calling for is any different than CAPPS I, which is what CAPPS II is trying to fix.

MS. MURPHY: Jim.

MR. DEMPSEY: Well, in some points you're right. Barry made the point, Barry Steinhardt from the ACLU made the point and he was 100 percent correct, that the watch list or the do-not-fly list questions do simply get transferred over to CAPPS II.

There's still a question of who gets on the list? Who gets off the list? How accurate is the information on the list? How accurate is the identification of people on the list? I think that the heart of what's going on with CAPPS II is an effort to collect more accurate passenger identifying information.

That's a fraught issue in and of itself. But certainly those of you who used to, you know, if you used to look at your boarding pass even just a year ago, almost always only had part of your name. Now, they tend to have the full name. That's part of the effort to try to overcome the problems of the David Nelsons of the world and those with common names. I still think that what we're all saying here is, that black box of the creation of the watch list needs to be cleaned up and needs to be focused on.

And to the extent that that's what CAPPS II is about, I think that is a good exercise, and a necessary, and a legitimate exercise. Getting the Jane Adams off the list or ensuring that the Jane Adams who might be a suspected terrorist, if there is one, is not the one who is getting stopped and so on. Some of the identifying information can help that, although even there, as Laura alluded to, there's the problem of identity theft. But you will always have this problem. And that's a point to put the focus on ensuring that we are looking for the known terrorists. That's going to be a problem whatever you call the system.

MS. MURPHY: Yes. Please identify yourself.

MR. MCCUTCHEON: Chuck McCutcheon with New House. This question is for Grover. If this goes through and your concerns aren't addressed, is this the kind of thing that you could foresee Congress seeking to change, or block, or overturn and could that cause, you know, disharmony between, you know, the House and the White House?

MR. NORQUIST: I would certainly hope the Congress men and women weigh in now, just as I hope all Americans that are concerned about privacy will weigh in early. And that their concerns will be listened to.

We have seen an effort now by Ms. Wykowski of Alaska to talk about reforming some of the overreach in PATRIOT. We did see Butch Otter also stake out a role on sneak and peak. So Congress is not a potted plant and ought not to be.

And I think that efforts like this, I think, should encourage members of Congress, Republicans and Democrats, to feel more comfortable stepping forward and having the kind of courage Congressman Bob Barr has to say, look, let's take a look at this, not every power that the Federal Government or the Executive Branch asks for is wise or safe to entrust to them. And there's a reason we have a Congress. It's supposed to ask these questions and make these decisions as well.

MS. MURPHY: Yes. The interesting thing about all of this is that there has been very little vetting of this proposal before it was unleashed in regulations. And I think that that in itself is problematic.

And Congressman Sabo, I think, and Congressman Mica, and Senator Ron Wyden have been making inquiries, in particular, about CAPPS II. So perhaps you can ask them questions. I've been getting the hands -- I'm sorry, David.

MR. KEEN: I was going to say that much of this was developed, has been in the development stage for a long time. But when you go back to PATRIOT and you go to all of these things, Total Information Awareness, much of this was initiated in the time immediately following September 11th, when people weren't looking at things. I think that the Congress now is looking skeptically at these requests. Certainly that's true of the House Judiciary Committee, it's true of Congress in general. And I think that that's the proper role.

It isn't a Democratic or Republican problem, it's a governmental problem. Whenever you've got this kind of a situation, you've got the Executive Branch and you've got law enforcement, they're going to be seeking more power, they're going to be seeking more turf, more responsibility. And it's at that point that people that are concerned about those things have to stand up and say, wait a minute, is this really something we want.

MS. MURPHY: Last question. Sir, you had your hand up.

MR. GROSS: Grant Gross from IDG News Service. My question is, what's new here today? I think I've heard most of you talk about your opposition to CAPPS II and TIA and other such projects in the past. So the message today seems to be, we're still against CAPPS II.

MS. MURPHY: The first thing is that there's a pilot program that is supposed to be launched this fall implementing a phase of CAPPS II. So it's about -- it's closer to implementation than we've ever known about.

What's different for you, Mr. Barr, anything?

MR. BARR: I don't know that it's really a question of what's different. These issues that we're raising here, the concerns that we're raising here today deserve to be raised over, and over, and over, and over again, so that the message does get through to those in a position to do something about it, both in the Congress, as Grover has said, as well as in the administration.

MR. NORQUIST: And they have moved a little bit.

MR. BARR: Yes. I think the fact that there was the Otter Amendment that was adopted by the House a few weeks ago indicates that the concerns of the American people, as collectively voiced through these and other organizations is finally reaching the ears of some members of Congress at least. The fact that the Attorney General felt the need to take a whistle-stop tour of the country to defend the PATRIOT Act, I think also is an indication that the message is getting through to the executive branch.

That would not have happened, had we just issued one letter, or one paper, or one news release and then walked away and done something else. It's a process of building up the public's awareness, educating the public, raising these issues over and over again. And each time you do, you reach different people, more people that then hopefully will take that message to their representatives, raise it with the administration and so forth. It's a building effort and that's why this is so very important. Particularly now, as we are beginning to get into the public comment period for the Privacy Notice, it's very appropriate that we have this forum today.

MS. MURPHY: That's an important point. The comment period is now. It ends when, the end of October I think? The end of September?

UNKNOWN: September 25th or the 22nd.

MS. MURPHY: So the citizens don't have a lot of time to get their -- make their views known. And again, to TSA's credit, they do listen, they have met with groups. We can't say the same thing about the Attorney General in terms of outreach to groups that the TSA has engaged in and we thank them for that.

Jim, did you have something to add?

MR. DEMPSEY: I was going to say that, you know, the day after the notice came out, the Washington Post had a headline saying, CAPPS II program narrowed, and then the other way round, the New York Times had a headline saying, CAPPS II program expanded. And I think one of the purposes of this, since we've now all had some time to look at it, to digest it, to read the actual language of the notice in some detail, which we weren't able to do the day it came out, and so we're all here to say, I think there were some stories that indicated, well, problem solved. They've issued a revised notice. They're not keeping it for 50 years anymore. And we're all here today to say, the problem is not solved.

MS. MURPHY: Before we close, I'd like to give each of the panelists an opportunity to talk about their website address. Grover, we'll start with you and work our way through the panel.

MR. NORQUIST: Sure. Americans for Tax Reform is at .

MS. MURPHY: Mr. Barr.

MR. BARR: Thank you very much. Our website, and we work -- we have links with the other organizations here is .

MS. MURPHY: Jim.

MR. DEMPSEY: Center for Democracy and Technology is .

MS. MURPHY: Hilary.

MR. SHELTON: The NAACP, the website is .

MS. MURPHY: David.

MR. KEEN: I don't know about all those dots, but ours is .

MS. MURPHY: And ours is . And if you plug in CAPPS II, you will find a lot of information and analyses about the CAPPS system. Thank you so much for attending today. And I'm sure the panelists will remain to answer any unasked questions.

(At this point, the press conference was concluded.)

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